Oprah Winfrey's cable station, Oxygen, is doing a major promotion to "fight hunger" in Afghanistan via the Heifer Project. Heifer Project International is a U.S. charity that focuses on health, human services, disaster relief, the environment, and education.

Oxygen Media is a cable television network and website designed by women for women that focuses on talk, health, comedy, movies, sports, and advocacy. Oprah Winfrey is one of the founders. Oxygen is assisting Heifer International to get people to donate money to fly baby chicks to Afghanistan.

The Pitch: "Send a Chick to Afghanistan. We invite you to fight famine in Afghanistan. Oxygen and Heifer International are making it easy for you to send chicks and other livestock to war-torn and drought-ravaged Afghanistan. Your donation can help make a difference for more than 12 million people, particularly the most innocent and vulnerable victims-the children. . . . Poultry will help because the birds are so adaptable to the environment, supply an excellent source of nutrition through their eggs, and they're easy to transport."

• Baby chicks and other young animals are shipped overseas as airmail or cargo. In addition to the long hours or days of flight, these animals may be in planes at various terminals for hours without food or water. Countless animals arrive sick and dead. What will the impoverished Afghans do with all the sick and dead animals? Northwest Airlines reports that up to 30% of chicks arrive dead in domestic flights. What about international flights? The only reason chicks "are easy to transport" is that they are small, inhumanely packed in boxes, airmailed at the cheapest rate, and shipped in huge numbers.
  
  
• "Nutrition through their eggs" means battery caged hen operations-one of the U.S.'s primary global exports to poor countries.
  
  
• Currently, Afghanistan is in the middle of a multi-year drought and famine. Afghans don't have enough food and water for themselves, let alone animals to care for. Animals who are already in Afghanistan are sick and dying for lack of veterinary care and treatment. There is a desperate need for more veterinary services, not more animals to tend and feed.
  
  
• The only guarantee that a purchaser's "gift animal" reaches his or her destination in some war-torn zone is the receipt mailed to the donor. People are sending money, but what proof is there that Heifer's animal exploitation project, inhumane as it is, actually "saves lives," "helps children," "fights poverty" in Afghanistan?
  
  
• The Heifer Project and Oxygen Media are fueling the world's bloodshed and chaos by adding animal misery and abuse to U.S. bombs, landmines, and civilian suffering and death in Afghanistan. Promoting the idea that sending animals to be tended and fed by famine-stricken countries plagued with drought and American bombs is absurd and misleading.
  
  
• People who truly want to help the people of Afghanistan should support famine relief organizations that provide direct aid. For example, the Red Cross is providing rice, oil, and peas for immediate consumption.

Protest to Oxygen Media and Heifer International

On March 25, I spoke on the phone with veterinarian Robert Pelant, who is Heifer International's Program Director for Asia and the South Pacific. Dr. Pelant said the "Send a Chick to Afghanistan" fundraiser is symbolic gift idea and does not entail actually sending chicks from the USA to Afghanistan; the chicks could not survive the journey. Heifer instead operates hatcheries that produce a type of chicken from Egypt called Fayoumi, a beautiful hardy multicolored bird with gray-brown and white feathers and long legs.

The Fayoumi chicken eggs, which come from Northwest Pakistan, are hatched in training centers in the refugee camps. Many of these camps, having existed since 1979, have achieved the status of towns or villages with their own vegetable shops, family gardens, barber shops, donkeys, etc. The chicks are distributed from the hatcheries by foot or truck to a few surrounding villages or campsites. One family gets about ten birds. 2000 Afghani families are part of this particular project that involves about 20,000 Fayoumi chickens a year. (According to a report on March 15 on www.meatingplace.com, only 70 families have been given chickens so far.)

Families eligible for chickens under the Heifer Project are not "the poorest of the poor," Pelant explained. They are families with some money, land, and education. There is generally a woman householder (the men are off to war), and an average of perhaps 5 children per family-enough people to handle the chickens, who are used for eggs and slaughtered by the Muslim halal method in which the neck is cut and the bird bleeds out from either the jugular vein (said to be very cruel) or the carotid artery (said to be less cruel). The men may have degrees in business or some other profession or they may be agricultural laborers, but they are not the "down and out." According to Pelant, "We don't address the poorest of the poor."

The chickens, he said, roam by day in courtyards surrounded by 10-foot-high adobe walls. They are fed crop byproducts, food waste, and the rough parts of vegetables as well as foraging on their own. At night they are put into pens, or they go voluntarily into pens with roosting areas, according to Pelant. Were Afghanis to repatriate, they would try to sell all of their birds, except maybe two hens, to villagers (campsite refugees), and take the 2 hens with them in a van or bus on a trip of 40 to 200 miles. When traveling with chickens on a bus, Afghanis tie a string around the birds' two feet and hold them in their laps. Regardless of how they cart the birds, they tend to tie their legs together.

What Can I Do?

If you visit Heifer.org, you will see the misleading and unclear appeal that is being made to adults to get them to send money to Heifer International. The appeal is directed to the level of a four-year-old child showing cuddly "Easter Basket" chicks, rabbits, and ducks without a hint of how these animals are actually being exploited. Heifer International has multiple fundraising appeals to send all kinds of animals all over the world and makes everything look like Snow White and Little Golden Books. We urge people to check out heifer.org and protest.

Express your views to:

United Poultry Concerns, Inc. PO Box 150 Machipongo, VA 23405-0150 757-678-7875 FAX: 757-678-5070 www.upc-online.org (Action Alert - Protest "Send a Chick to Afghanis-Scam")

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